"O Gabriella!" he exclaimed, his eyes flashing through the shrouding mist like burning stars, "how I wish you felt with me! Were it possible to build a home on this shelving rock, I would willingly dwell here forever, surrounded by this veiling mist. With you thus clasped in my arms, I could be happy, in darkness and clouds, in solitude and dreariness, anywhere, everywhere,--with the conviction that you loved me, and that you looked for happiness alone to me." "As this moment," I answered, drawing more closely to him, "I fear as if I would rather stay here and die, than return to the world and mingle in its jarring elements. I would far rather, Ernest, make my winding-sheet of those cold, unfathomable waters, than live to feel again the anguish of being doubted by you." "That is all past, my Gabriella,--all past. My nature is renewed and purified. I feel within me new-born strength and power of resistance. By the God of yon roaring cataract--" "No,--no, Ernest, do not promise,--I dare not hear you, we are so weak, and temptations are so strong." "Do you distrust yourself, or me?" "Both, Ernest. I never, never felt how poor and vain and frail we are, till I stood, as now, in the presence of the power of the Almighty." His countenance changed instantaneously. "To what temptations do you allude?" he asked. "I can imagine none that could shake my fidelity to you. My constancy is as firm as this rock. Those rushing waves could not move it. Why do you check a vow which I dare to make in the very face of Omnipotence?" "I doubt not your faith or constancy, most beloved Ernest; I doubt not my own. You know what I do fear,--misconstruction and suspicion. But let us not speak, let us not think of the past. Let us look forward to the future, with true and earnest spirits, praying God to help us in weakness and error. Only think, Ernest, we have that within us more mighty than that descending flood. These souls of ours will still live in immortal youth, when that whelming tide ceases to roll, when the firmament shrivels like a burning scroll. I never realized it so fully, so grandly, as now. I shall carry from this rock something I did not bring. I have received a baptism standing here, purer than fire, gentle as dew, yet deep and pervading as ocean. I cannot describe what I mean, but I feel it. Before I came, it seemed as if a great wall of adamant rose between me and heaven; now there is nothing but this veil of mist." As we turned to leave this region of blinding spray and mysterious shadows, Ernest repeated, in his most melodious accents, a passage from Schiller's magnificent poem of the diver. "And it bubbles and seethes, and it hisses and roars, As when fire is with water commixed and contending; And the spray of its wrath to the welkin upsoars, And flood upon flood hurries on, never ending. And it never _will_ rest, nor from travail be free, Like a sea, that is laboring the birth of a sea."